Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power - Carnage and Culture

Having long been a fan of Hanson's clear, focused political columns, often linked in my Old Jarhead blog, I was delighted to stumble across one of his history books. In Carnage and Culture, Hanson considers European and American battles against non-western forces from Salamis to Tet. He links western military success to our institutions and culture, including the rights afforded citizens no where but the west, and the ability of free markets to create, innovate and build weapon systems. Some of his quotes alone are worth the price of the book. Referring to the flyers at Midway, many of whom sacrificed their lives in that great victory, Hanson writes, "One wonders if an America of suburban, video-playing Nicoles, Ashleys, and Jasons shall ever see their like again."

He also reports that, "In the first two years after the fall of Saigon (1975-77) there were almost twice as many total civilian fatalities in Southeast Asia ... as all those incurred during the ten years of American involvement." That, and his comparison of the rules of engagement in Vietnam to WWII will especially resonate with Vietnam Vets.

He also writes that (Capitalism) is a peculiar Western practice that acknowledges the self-interest of man and channels that greed to the production of vast amounts of goods and services through free markets and institutionalized guarantees of personal profit, free exchange, deposited capital, and private property." The economically-ignorant OWS crowd might well wonder what they would do without credit cards, laptops, smart phones, not to mention food and clothing, if they destroy the system that has created a surplus of goods and freedom from want. I highly recommend this book.

Robert A. Hall
Author: The Coming Collapse of the American Republic
(All royalties go to a charity to help wounded veterans)

The author's fundamental hypothesis, that Western armies are more effective warriors than any other, because the Western armies are free (or, perhaps I should say, are not living under authoritarian governments), has remained with me. I have considered the hypothesis during several subsequent reads. For instance, I am considering it in light of what I am reading about WWI. Though initially hesitant to do so (particularly the French), the French and English armies eventually adapted to their conditions, as they should be want to do, according to Hanson's hypothesis. In this case I am drawn to the hypothesis.

However, I am, at the same time, dissuaded from believing the theory by the same treatise about WWI. The Russians, though not exactly living in a free society under the Czar, had to overcome tremendous logistical obstacles to present a credible threat to the Germans. I can't help but doubt the ingenuity shown by individuals in the Russian Army in getting before the Germans, particularly during the first few weeks of August 1914, when the French desperately needed the Russians to distract the Germans.

Hanson has made an interesting case here. Though I am not thoroughly convinced by his theory, I can say that the work is thoughtfully presented.

Carnage and Culture is a fascinating and very well written book. Professor Hanson's subject is Western military prowess, which in his view stems from inherent cultural advantages that have, for the past two and a half millennia, endowed the West with a uniquely lethal way of waging war against its adversaries. He chooses nine landmark battles in which western armies either triumphed, usually against numerical odds, or else recovered from defeat with a vigor that demonstrated indomitable military superiority. He starts with the dramatic naval victory of the ancient Greeks over the invading Persians at Salamis, and moves chronologically forward up through the so-called Tet Offensive, in which twentieth century Americans battled Vietnamese communists. Along the way, he discusses Cortez's destruction of the Aztecs, the British conquest of the Zulu nation, the American victory over the Japanese navy at the Midway, and four other bloody encounters between Western forces and Muslim, African or Asian adversaries. Professor Hanson opens each chapter with a vivid description of the battle itself, then devotes the remainder of his text to placing the battle into the political and social context of it's time and to weaving in the threads that tie it to the bigger historical picture he wants us to see. While I found Carnage and Culture to be highly thought-provoking, I have some problems with it too. Critics on the left will discern a conservative ideological agenda at work here, most obviously in the Vietnam chapter, where he digresses into a well-argued but off-the-subject attack on the 60's anti-war Left and the media. Beyond that, the book tends to strain as the author squeezes 2500 years of complex history into a pretty narrow dimension. He's selective in his focus and dismissive of much that doesn't seem to fit. Problematically, he never really addresses the question of what he, or the rest of us, mean exactly when we talk about "The West". He states, and I think sincerely, that he's not making any kind of racialist argument here. But then what? Aztecs or American Indians or Zulus are not part of "The West". Alexander the Great was, but presumably contemporary Macedonians would not be. Oddly, he rarely mentions the Russians, and it's not clear which box he would put them into - probably NonWest, since they usually seem to lose their wars. If what he's really doing is simply generalizing about technologically underdeveloped people and telling us they lose wars, then the argument devolves into tautology. But I think he's doing quite a bit more than that. Hanson is a professor of classical studies, and his understanding of the ancient Greeks permeates this book. If pressed on the issue, he would probably define "The West" in the conventional manner as those societies whose cultural and intellectual roots can be traced back to these remarkable people. Reduced to basics, Hanson's thesis is that it is the spirit of empirical pragmatism - i.e., scientific method - that facilitates development of tools for cultural, economic and military dominance. At this level, of course, the argument is beyond debate and too obvious to be of much interest. However, he goes on to argue that it is the spirit of democracy which unleashes the full power of scientific method, providing both the creative freedom and the incentive necessary for an unrestrained pursuit of practical objectives, including the annihilation of enemies on the battlefield. Since the ancient Greeks were pioneers of both scientific method and democracy, it is with them that we see the first flourishing of this lethal combination. It is with them and with modern-day Americans that Hanson's thesis rings most convincingly, but with much that lies between, it tends to falter. Hanson, to my mind, goes too far in attributing the benefits of democracy and scientific method somehow to the various monarchies and autocracies that have dominated much of Western history until recently. Furthermore, he seems to rely too much on assumption and stereotypical thinking in describing the relative disadvantages of the ancient Persians, medieval Muslims, and the other non-Western adversaries, about whom historians really know very little. Hanson teaches at an American university, and I'm told by my university friends that at most schools today, debates about "The West" are fashionable, with embattled conservative minorities generally defending "The West" against ascendant leftist multi-culturalists. It seems likely that the ideological edge to Hanson's book emanates reflexively from his own pre-occupation with academic politics. It's odd, though, that he isn't arguing any moral superiority on the part of the West, only superior capacity for mass slaughter on the battlefield, a point with which his leftist critics would surely concur. So the debating point would seem to be wasted anyway. Hanson is a lucid thinker, a knowledgeable historian, and an excellent writer, and despite its limitations, I enjoyed Carnage and Culture immensely. He could do much more with this subject if he would let himself turn away from the tedious West-NonWest focus and give us an objective study exploring the historical relationship between democracy, science and military power.

This book is well worth the money. The author goes into the essence of the theory (really scientific fact) of Western attitudes to fighting and the dominance of European and extra-European nations in the art of warfare. Davis goes on to describe the battle of Salamis to the Tet offensive and holds not bar. Davis isn't concerned about PC and argues that Western Culture especially the ability to criticize, responsibility, and citizensoldiers are superior to other cultures with an individual warrior culture. For example, Davis talks about the role of disciplined fighting versus the use of slave soldiers (i.e. janissaries) and individual prowess that the Ottomans used in Lepanto. Davis further argues and provides evidence that even though the Ottomans are famous for hiring renegade experts and western technology, it didn't do them any good and lead them to become the Sick Man of Europe. Davis argues and proves a scientific and freedom loving culture can overcome any religious and individualistic war culture in his book.

This is an interesting and stimulating book. Hanson argues that it has been political and social ideas of freedom and democracy that have given the West its edge in the military arena. He uses several well founded examples to support his case.
Hanson is most at home with the ancient Greeks and Roman history and his analysis of Salamis, Gaugamela and Cannae are highpoints of the book. The chapter on Tet is poor.
His overall thesis is that the west gains power basically through a commitment - sometimes a very loose commitment - to individual freedom which translates into better military technology and discipline on the battlefield.
The other chapters are all thought provoking and stimulating. While the book is provocative, it also repeats itself constantly and you find yourself tempted to move on.
The edition I read contained an analysis of September 11 attack, and in this case Hanson is far more clear in his thinking and analysis. Indeed, he is stronger at synthesis and draws some fascinating conclusions about western power from his research.

I would not be discouraged from buying this book because of the one-star rating given by one of the reviewers. After reading the book I found that his review is similar to what you might expect from a philosophy graduate student who can't get over the fact that some civilizations are superior to others when it comes to some areas of human endeavor. Stick to space books, CS!
The book offers a different view of history based on critical battles and offers some explanations why smaller military forces could win over either primitive of theocratically driven groups.
A lot of us wonder today why fanatical religious groups seem to "be out of it" and don't learn from history or their mistakes. This books helps to explain why this is happening in our time, and I found that explanation quite plausile.
It also gives a very interesting look at important historical figues and what motivated them.
So, if you like history, military history, and want a politically incorrect view of why some things today are the way they are, buy this book.

Another thought-provoking book from Mr. Hanson. The argument of the book is simply stated: Western countries have always fought differently and more effectively than all other civilizations on the planet. Although I am not convinced of the complete truth of the hypothesis, where do the mongols fit, for example, the author does array quite a few battle studies that fit his opinon. More importantly, the book is an attempt to explain a question that everyone is curious about but few authors have the courage to attempt to answer: Why is the West the dominant culture politically and militarily on this planet? This book may not be the total explanation, I believe it almost certainly is not, but the author deserves points for attempting to address this important question. As with all Mr. Hanson's books, it is superbly and lively written.

Outstanding thesis: The West isn't fundamentally different from any other civilization in history -- not braver, not better. Like everyone else, we kicked but to get what we wanted. We just did it better than everyone else, at least we have over the recent millennium. He poses an explanation of why we were able to do that. He attributes it to a combination of nine characteristics of Western culture that usually were not found together in other cultures, and certainly not as consistently as in the West: freedom, civic militarism, decisive battle (as opposed to ritualistic battle), technology, capitalism, discipline, civil control over military operations, free speech and dissent, and constitutional government.
A most interesting read (albeit a bent towards Eurocentrism probably makes it easier to accept).

Excellent descriptions and analyses of historic battle and an intriguing and oddly pessimistic theis make this a compelling read for those interested in military history or the Western cultural tradition. One might argue with the selection of battles, but in every case Hanson presents a fascinating comparison between the cultures of the opposing forces. I was very disappointed that the paperback copy I have is missing key captions from most of the maps, clearly misprinted - partial captions in some cases, blank spaces in others - which made the maps of limited usefulness. Especially interesting is Hanson's rather pessimistic view of future wars - he does not share the commmon wisdom that Western democracies will not attack each other. On the whole a well-written and thought provoking read, though you may not be convinced of his main idea.

I enjoyed this book, which I heard of after hearing Hanson and Jared Diamond on NPR. Some of his comments on the air and in the intro are directed at the latter's _Guns, Germs & Steel_. Rather than presenting an alternate explanation for Western dominance I felt both books are two sides of the same coin.
This book falls short not in its premise, but that it never asks why the West fights the way it does. Sure, freemen make better soldiers than slaves, and total war is more devastating than ritual war, but what caused the West to adopt these stances? IMO Diamond's study tackles these questions, whereas Hanson ignores them.
My other quibbles with this book are minor; overall it is excellently written. The "Top Ten" - pick and choose method of battles makes me wonder if he ignored battles that undermine his theory. Overall, his arguments weaken as approaches modern times - guns and germs explain the outcomes of Tenochtitlan, Lepanto and Rorke's Drift as well as civic militarism does. And I wonder why the "individualism" exhibited by Zulu warriors is bad while the "individualism" of Americans at Midway is good.
Again, make no mistake, this book was great. Had it sought for or concentrated on the roots of Western warfare in Greece it would be even better. I advise readers to take its contents in context with other books in the field.

This book is filled with imagery and thorough in its descriptions of the people, places, and circumstances -- particularly the cultures -- of the battles. In reading this one book I gained a greater comprehension of lost civilizations and the advance of history than was ever taught in school, save Rome. You'll [re]discover Greece, Macedon, Persia, Byzantines, Carthage, Romans, Franks, Saracens, Mexicas, Aztecs, Ottomans etc...

It is far more gratifying than one might think to finally get a good understanding of what took place in past wars. One realizes just how momentous the occasions were -- you can almost feel the Earth move under your feet as the gears of history shift overnight, altering the course of human events forever. Hansen's tone is grave, battle-weary, but fueled by the strength of his argument: that Western culture and values give advantage to the peoples who live by them. It is certainly one of the most powerful reads you'll come across.

Hanson presents an interesting thesis as to the bases of Western hegemony (scientific advance, church/state separation, and democratic ethos) but there are many holes to be plugged. The Mongols for example, who barely appear in Hanson's book, conducted some of the most sweeping military campaigns in history and were as ruthless, destructive and amoral as any Western example. What about the Byzantines? Then there is the problem of the Russians. Are they Western? And they could not exactly be said to be marked by personal freedom, or democratic ethos. Yet the Russians consistently built and deployed dominant military forces that outclassed almost anything "the West" could field during the latter stages of World War II, and its aftermath. These are major holes that Hanson needs to address adequately, particularly his definition of who is the "West".
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Even what should be a straighforward example of the thesis raises some questions. It is a stretch to say that the personal freedom citizen-soldier part of the equation was responsible for defeat of the Zulu. In fact, colonial wars by more advanced civilizations against tribal peoples throughout history have been won by authoritarian regimes that did not have such traditions, such as the Russians against the tribal peoples of Siberia, or the Arabs in Africa, or the Turks against many others.
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The Zulu example primarily highlights the value of technological superiority. In fact such conflicts followed a familar routine: (1) the Europeans advance with modern weapons and set up a strongly defended position, (2) the natives conveniently charge, (3) the natives are decimated by superior firepower, (4) roll credits.
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The redcoats are certainly to be commended for their brave stand against the natives "black as hell, and thick as grass", and it paints a dramatic black vs white picture, but it is a PUFFED UP PICTURE. Such encounters were a common scenario in colonial warfare, usually ending with the defeated native armies melting away as bullets thud into flesh. And a stout stand by a small number of defenders is nothing new in military history. Defenders in a fortified or protected position always have certain advantages over attackers and only a small number are required to stalemate a larger force, as history shows numerous times.
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Hanson notes that the Zulu were well armed with guns after their great victory of Isandwalhana. But in fact, the tribal fighters were poor marksmen and did not know how to use firearms effectively. They aimed high, so as to give the bullets "strength" as Donald Morris points out in his classic "Washing of the Spears". But lest anyone be tempted to smile mockingly at the inept black natives, it should be pointed out that poor marksmanship and aiming high was a common criticism by some against the white French in the Penisular Wars against Wellington. Whatever the quantity of firearms available, at best, such firepower as the natives deployed was primarily of nuisance value. Effectively, the Zulu fought on as they always did- obsolete spear and shield, against bullet and rifle.
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Western technological superiority can be countered in 5 main ways: (a) the opposing forces deploy over a wide area concentrating only when numbers are superior vis a vis local opposition, (b) they have a surplus of manpower (c) they lure the Western forces deep into prepared killing grounds or unfavorable terrain (benefitting from interior lines), (d) they maximize deception and surprise attacks, and (e) they exhibit mobility and tactical flexibility. There are other factors but these are the big 5.
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The VC/NVA proved this in Vietnam, as did the Chinese in Korea.
Osama Bin Laden proved this also on 9/11 drawing from the mix described above. The Zulu possessed some of these factors but squandered their advantages. Their problem was not simply lack of firearms (although this was a major problem). It also included inflexibility in tactics. They always attacked using the same "human wave" approach- with the outstretched "horns" of the flanking regiments encircling the opposing force, followed by crushing pressure from the main force units of the central "chest". Such an approach, and its variants from India to Mexico, was tailor made for easy European victories - see natives charge, see natives get shot down, see natives melt away.
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When the Zulu showed some flexibility they were much a more dangerous and challenging opponent, even though effectively armed with only spears and shields. At Isandalhana, they charged as usual in the classic "buffalo horn" formation, but they had managed to move up the bulk of their force at night (over 10,000 men) secretly within striking distance of the British, catching them when the redcoat camp was not fully consolidated for easy turkey shooting.
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At the Battle of the Holbane mountain where they drove back a British column, the Zulu again showed some flexibility, sheltering the regiments in ravines and reverse slopes, and attacking in several swarms when the redcoasts were strung out on the track, rather than advancing in typical, mass human wave fashion to be conveniently shot down by European bullets. At the Intombi River, they carried out a fairly rare night attack, to decimate a British supply force- something that could have been repeated to telling effect on exposed British supply lines. The Zulu War might have had a different outcome had the tribal fighters utilized their advantages more flexibly, and deployed more manpower over a wider area. They failed for example to attack the British rear area at Natal when it was at their mercy, fatally allowing the redcoats some leisure to resupply, re-equip, and redeploy.
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The same inflexibility marked Japanese operations in WWII as the Battle of Midway amply shows. Numerous battles can be detailed and the detail shows that parts of Hanson's thesis can sometimes be questionable. Hanson could have dealt more too with how the West can mobilize more massive resources on a sustained, and wider scale than non-Western opponents. This was certainly the case against Japan- enabling the US to advance on what some claim to be a "wasteful" 2 front approach- Nimitz's Central Pacific, and MacArthur's SouthWest prong.
Nevertheless, as a broad brush, broad stroke theory, Hanson's work certainly has much to commend it.

Carnage and Culture is an interesting book with an interesting thesis: That Democratic countries are the best war machines since Democracy imbibes its fighters with a spirit and a sense of gain and loss impossible for other societies. Mr. Hanson, despite some flaws does a good job of making the arguments.The book is also an interesting response to Jared Diamond's more deterministic thesis presented in Guns, Germs and Steel.
However, I think the battles chosen were chosen to specifically match the thesis and that a more thorough view of other battles may prove part of the thesis wrong. In other words I sometimes wonder if Mr. Hanson is stretching to prove a point.
I also have some problems with Mr. Hanson's organization. While he makes his points he also seems to bounce around within each section so that the section does not necessarily seem unified by chronology or theme. This also makes parts of the book seem repetitive. This problem is exacerbated by Mr. Hanson's proclivity toward stating a fact multiple times.
Still it is a good book and I found certain sections, like the one on Roarke's Drift especially fascinating.

I enjoyed this book. It is well-written and literate. It makes a good companion (or counterpoint) to Jared Diamond's "Guns, Steel, and Bacteria" -- successfully persuading me that more than early environmental factors account for the rise and continued material success of Western cultures vizaviz other cultures. I'm not as convinced by the book's central premise -- that the success of the West on battlefields is accounted for by its origins in the Greek polity of ancient Athens. OK, so it may be to some extent true. But, by the end of the book, I found myself positively irritated by the number of times this had been offered as a reason for everything. Also, the chapter on Viet Nam made me want to gargle with a good clarifying mouth wash: yuck! That said, the actual battle descriptions make engaging and thrilling reading.

This is a great book for anyone interested in the history of Western civilization and the military dominance of European culture throughout the world. The author brilliantly links the history of ancient Greece and their democratic and republican military traditions to the spread of Western civilization and their nearly complete domination of Eastern and New World cultures through brutally efficient military supremacy. The book uses many famous battles, not as tactical demonstrations or even exercises in strategic thinking, but as backdrops to underscore the political and social evolution and ideologies that led to the military dominance of the West.

I enjoyed this book. It is well-written and literate. It makes a good companion (or counterpoint) to Jared Diamond's "Guns, Steel, and Bacteria" -- successfully persuading me that more than early environmental factors account for the rise and continued material success of Western cultures vizaviz other cultures. I'm not as convinced by the book's central premise -- that the success of the West on battlefields is accounted for by its origins in the Greek polity of ancient Athens. OK, so it may be to some extent true. But, by the end of the book, I found myself positively irritated by the number of times this had been offered as a reason for everything. Also, the chapter on Viet Nam made me want to gargle with a good clarifying mouth wash: yuck! That said, the actual battle descriptions make engaging and thrilling reading.

This is a great book for anyone interested in the history of Western civilization and the military dominance of European culture throughout the world. The author brilliantly links the history of ancient Greece and their democratic and republican military traditions to the spread of Western civilization and their nearly complete domination of Eastern and New World cultures through brutally efficient military supremacy. The book uses many famous battles, not as tactical demonstrations or even exercises in strategic thinking, but as backdrops to underscore the political and social evolution and ideologies that led to the military dominance of the West.

More than just a military history, this book really makes one look at history in a different light. When it became clear to me in the first few pages that he was taking on Jared Diamond's theories from _Guns, Germs, and Steel_, I hopped around with joy. (I was in the airport in Hawaii at the time -- a little embarrasing, I guess.) This was going to be a good debate.

Not only did Hanson take on Diamond, but he definitely changed my mind. Western culture with it's ideas of citizenship and freedom really have been the source of Western supremacy. It's always interesting to take a very big view of history to try to understand the strong underlying themes that drive and/or influence everything.

Hanson is quickly becoming my favorite author.

Victor Hanson has written an outstanding book with a very persuasive thesis--and yet, as Peggy Lee once queried, "Is that all there is?"

It long has been claimed that one of the main distinguishing characteristics of Western people is their "dynamism," a creative, outward-looking forcefulness, which can have both positive and negative consequences. Victor Hanson examines the West's "military dynamism," maintaining that it originated 2500 years ago in the small farming valleys of Greece, and with "civic dynamism" has made possible the West's leading role in the world today.

Hanson tells us how the small farm owners of early Greece would periodically march into battle, shoulder-to-shoulder, with body armor, spears and interlocking shields. Their phalanx, or columnar, formations would move quietly and methodically up and down battlefields almost as one fearsome organism. Regularly needing to return to tend to their fields, these voting citizen-soldiers were willing to engage in quick decisive face-to-face "shock collisions."

Among Hanson's nine decisive battles, two of particular interest were against Islamic forces, near Poitiers in 732, and in the Gulf of Lepanto eight centuries later. Also timely, coming in the aftermath of a sneak attack, was the Battle of Midway.

Western war-making advantages include the ability to carry out these very organized straight-on, relentless attacks (less advantageous against guerillas or terrorists). Our free market civic culture encourages autonomy, creativity, flexibility, initiative and technological advancement.

Hanson does have concerns about Western warfare, particularly as the world's war-making becomes increasingly Westernized. Still, this military dynamism-let's hope reluctantly used-is quite something. Not only in its ability to win, but, as Hanson shows, in being able to turn defeat into ultimate victory.

As extensive as this book is on the origins of the Western war-making, one can't help wondering if the Greek hoplites, instead of being THE explanation for Western dynamism, played only a major role in its development? Which leads to other questions.

As far as time and place, were there really no significant instances of Western dynamism predating or outside the early Greek republics? Is it truly impossible that there might have been sprouts of this dynamism taking hold in other less nurturing soils?

On this topic Hanson seems to protest too much-repeating "only then and not before," "only there and nowhere else." Otherwise, of course, genetics, including intelligence, might raise its ugly head. But, really now, even if we try to think of dynamism and intelligence as originally separate, how could two human traits so demonstrably powerful, subtle, and adaptable interact over thousands of years without each significantly effecting the other?

Isn't it possible that ancient Greece was where early Western dynamism, being so well nurtured, first flowered into something so historically important? If a small asteroid had cruelly cannonballed into those tiny Greek farming valleys 2500 years ago, would today's something-less-than-dynamic Europe, possibly under invasion from the Aztecs, be embarked upon a crash program to invent the flintlock musket? Or perhaps even the invention of the 1503 pocket-handkerchief would remain today only a distant shining dream?

Oddly, while Professor Hanson stresses the impossibility of any connection between Western dynamism and genetics, in a book that otherwise marches phalanx after phalanx of detailed facts across 492 pages of history in support of Western military superiority, it is difficult to find a single paragraph of reasoned argument in support of this impossibility-of-genetics contention.

Of course the denial of any meaningful genetic differences among human groups is in keeping with today's Primary Taboo. A taboo that has become so satirically extreme that when outward physical differences are to the extent that they simply cannot be denied, say, between pigmies and Vikings (please repeat: merely skin color), even this must be pressed into service as still more proof that there are absolutely no significant internal genetic differences.

If scholars were to adhere to the same can't-be-genetics assumption about countless other subspecies, from orchids to horses, their position would be considered about as scientifically rigorous as if they were to take for granted the existence of large alligators happily lumbering under the city streets of New York.

Nevertheless, the idea that significant genetic differences exist among human groups is simply unthinkable. But not so unthinkable that it does not need to be denied twelve times throughout Professor Hanson's book.

Of course even a genetic component would not mean Europeans are "superior" (or more accomplished) in this way or that in some ultimate, cosmic sense. Some Asian groups have higher average IQs. And all different cultures, tribes and races, having their different attributes, outlooks and values, have traditionally thought of themselves as superior to outsiders, and have every right to. Comically, it is only Europeans, or whites, who work tirelessly to prove that they are not only no better than anyone else, but morally inferior--"racist," "sexist," "xenophobic," etc. Thankfully, when it comes to such extreme ethnofugalism--this obsessive flight from the center of one's own inherited culture--Victor Hanson has too much integrity to take part.

Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of the West, it has its own special character that should be preserved, rather than allowed to be overwhelmed by mass Third World legal and illegal immigration. If such a statement seems extreme, anyone can take a pocket-calculator and project current demographic trends over the next few generations. And to reduce the whole problem simply to one of "inadequate assimilation," an argument many "conservatives" cling to like a tattered baby blanket, is to be oblivious to (or dodge) a core component of civilizational suicide.

Overall, Victor Hanson is to be applauded for writing unashamedly about the West's military superiority. Although such superiority should be obvious to any child of twelve, Hanson explains it bravely (for these tremulous times) and brilliantly, including some of its most important origins.

However, that such an otherwise excellent work could contain so central a blind spot chillingly illustrates that we are living today in a time of political correctness that can only be described as an intellectually discombobulating, again to borrow from Ms Lee, "Fever!"

While the views espoused in this book will undoubtedly anger many on the PC front, largely because they smack of Western "superiority", Hanson does an excellent job of proving his thesis: Western armies have triumphed throughout history in large part due to their value system(s), freedoms and reliance on volunteers (versus impressed conscripts or mercenaries).

He uses nine landmark battles, beginning with the Greeks at Salamis and ending with the American triumph in the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War. There are a couple of "wobbles" in my opinion: Alexander the Great was certainly no proponent of democratic values, nor was Hernan Cortes, but, overall, Hanson makes his point and makes it stick.

His handling of the battle of Rorke's Drift (Anglo-Zulu War of 1879) and Midway (Pacific War/WWII) are especially adept, given the courage and elan of both the Zulus and Japanese. The edge enjoyed by the British and Americans, respectively, is ascribed to the initiative inherent to a system that not only develops free thought and freedom of action, but encourages it.

We live in an age where, as Americans, we are told our history is largely one of oppression and that our sacrifices in wars ranging from WWII to Korea and Vietnam are nothing more than propaganda used to further our (neo)imperialistic aims. To see the Western way of war shown in a continuum, starting with the ancient Greeks, places history in a workable context.

Definitely a recommended read.

Carnage and Culture provides a fascinating counterpoint to Jared Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel. Where Diamond's study fell short was in that it explained why Eurasia might dominate the world, but he failed to carry on and explain why Europe would dominate all. Hanson fills that gap. The only shortcomings of the book were a certain amount of redundancy and also some minor factual errors (such as referring to troops of the US 7th Division as "marines."

Although some with an agenda might claim that this is work of historical determinism or chauvinism, it is not. Rather, it demonstrates that how societies organize themselves generally also impacts the way they organize for conflict. Not only is it a strong argument for how the differences in Western culture have significantly influenced its military hegemony, but it also educates the reader broadly on key historical events. So, while battle and warfare is the organizing feature of the book, it goes much deeper than that and is almost a survey of the last 2,500 years of Western history.

Reviewed by John Clements, Director the Association for Renaissance Martial Arts

"The general public itself is mostly unaware of their culture's own singular and continuous lethality in arms...for the past 2,500 years...there has been a peculiar practice of Western warfare, a common foundation and continual way of fighting that has made Europeans the most deadly soldiers in the history of civilization." So begins an early portion of this unique and forceful book that goes far beyond the suggestion of its humble title. The work will be of particular interest to students of historical fencing studies as it provides a unique perspective on the military tradition underlying our entire Western martial heritage.

Victor Hanson offers a lively, highly readable and controversial view of Western military tradition as being a direct offshoot of the values inherent in Western civilization. The central lesson of the book is how "The West's rise to dominance was not an accident. Its military prowess over the centuries has been the result of "larger social, economic, political, and cultural practices that themselves seemingly have little to do with war." Professor Hanson argues convincingly that we possess "a long standing Western cultural stance toward rationalism, free inquiry, and the dissemination of knowledge that has its roots in classical antiquity." He states his case unapologetically, relating that "while most historians admit of a European dominance in arms from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, fewer profess that since its creation the West has enjoyed martial advantages over its adversaries -or that such dominance is based not merely on superior weaponry but on cultural dynamism itself."

The book presents its material by selecting nine important battles that Hanson chooses to present larger ideas about the nature of Western civilization and it's cultural values in contrast to Asia, Africa, and South America, in order to explain "Why the West Has Won." He uses these to address larger questions as to why Europeans colonized Asian and Africa, and the Americas and not vice versa, and why Western values -especially in the realm of military science - have proven their worth and now dominate the world.

"The dramatic European expansion of the sixteenth century may well have been energized by western excellence in firearms and capital ships, but those discoveries were themselves the product of a long-standing Western approach to applied capitalism, science, and rationalism not found in other cultures. Thus, the sixteenth-century military renaissance was a reawakening of Western dynamism. It is better to call it a "transformation" in the manifestation of European battlefield superiority that had existed in the classical world for a millennium and was never entirely lost even during the darkest days of the Dark Ages. The "Military Revolution," then, was no accident, but logical given the Hellenic origins of European civilization."

Central to his thesis is the idea of individualism and civic militarism -ideas of which were spawned exclusively in ancient Greece (and their ancillaries consensual government, civilian audit, free speech, dissent, and market economics). As a classical scholar, Hanson misses no opportunity (sometimes repetitively so) to somehow relate every facet of history back to the ancient Greeks. From here he stresses the importance of a traditional "Western way of war" founded upon the concepts of shock infantry and battle of annihilation (this was in fact the very title of his earlier work on ancient Greek warfare).

Hanson's presents a view not often encountered of the "resilience and lethality of the West" that makes perfect sense. The basis of the book is that "In battles against the peoples of Asia, Africa, and the new World, tribal and imperial alike, there is a shared legacy over centuries that allowed Europeans and Americans to win in a consistent and deadly manner -or to be defeated on rare occasions only when the enemy embraced their own military organization, borrowed their weapons, or trapped them far from home." To this he concludes "From the fighting of early Greece to the wars of the entire twentieth century, there is a certain continuity of European military practice....this heritage of the Western war is not found in its entirety elsewhere, nor does it begin earlier than the Greeks." And that "the military affinities in Western war making across time and space from the Greeks to the present are uncanny, enduring, and too often ignored."

Hanson's real talent as a historian is his way of presenting cold facts in a brutal no-nonsense manner that still manages to instill excitement and appreciation to the reader for the humanity involved without losing the larger picture. The book offers ten chapters beginning with the crucial naval battle of Salamis in 480 BC where a vastly out numbered Greek fleet decimated a Persian armada to essentially save Western civilization. Next he contrast the armies, methods, and motives between East and West as exemplified in Alexander's victory over the Persians at Gaugamela in 331 BC. He then dissects the Roman defeat by Hannibal at Cannae in 216 BC and manages to show how even this was no set back. He then scrutinizes the first battle of Poitiers in 732 AD where Western Europe was saved from the Moors by a Frankish army. The most interesting chapter is that on battle of Tenochtitlán during Cortez's conquest of the Aztecs in 1520. It will also be of the most interest to students of Renaissance martial arts. Here Hanson presents a wide range of sober facts deflate the popular view of noble Mexica's simply being slaughtered by the "guns, germs and steel" of evil Conquistadors and reveals the encounter as being at its core a "conflict of cultures". Considerable material is presented that place success on the frequently minimized importance of Spanish military skills and martial prowess. The next chapter considers the Mediterranean naval battle of Lepanto in 1571 between the Turks and an Euro-Italian alliance. The details of the account provide some of the most significant examples supporting Hanson's thesis. Skipping ahead the work then analyzes the 1879 battle of Rorke's Drift during the Zulu war offering a number of observations. The battle of Midway in 1942 is then presented as a further example of the fundamental difference between the Western way of war and that of the rest of the planet, and how the element of cultural values plays such an important role in how and why different people's fight. Lastly, he ends with an anatomy of the tactical victory but strategic failure of the 1968 Tet offensive in the Vietnam war and how to a very large degree it characterizes the entire conflict. He is also careful to point out (at least toward the end) that "The battles of this study are offered as representative examples of general traits rather than absolute laws of military. They are episodes that reflect recurring themes, not chapters in a comprehensive history of Western warfare."

Though historians and military experts could surely debate ad nauseum the exceptions and minor details of his examples (such as the case of the Mongols and Ottomans), as any good writer does, Hanson generalizes in order to present the underlying fundamental elements with clarity. Indeed, at one point he specifically acknowledges, "Although important exceptions should always be noted, generalization -so long avoided by academics out of either fear or ignorance -is indispensable in the writing of history."

In many ways the work is a refutation of Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize winning, Guns, Germs, and Steel, of which Hanson points out some of the racism underlying Diamond's view. In essence, Hanson's view is that there is no clearer example of the differences in ideas and values that form the basis of cultures than in the clash of between East and West, specifically on the battlefield. Diamond, a geographical determinist beloved by cultural-relativists, has argued that differences of societies, technology, and successful civilizations can all be reduced to the luck of where they first rooted (i.e., what crops and livestock the land supported, the topology of their terrain, and what minerals were under their feet). Following Diamond's theory, we could imagine that the results of playing a good campaign of Sid Mier's computer game Civilization would not be determined by the ideas and wits of each individual player's own stratagems and decisions, but merely the random starting location each was given on the map. Anyone who's played the game at length knows full well that just as in real life, given the available resources individual choices affect the direction each culture takes. As Hanson puts it early on: "Land, climate, weather, natural resources, fate, luck, a few rare individuals of brilliance, natural disaster, and more -all these play their role in the formation of a distinct culture, but it is impossible to determine exactly whether man, nature, or chance is the initial catalyst for the origins of western civilization. What is clear, however, is that once developed, the West, ancient and modern, placed far fewer religious, cultural, and political impediments to natural inquiry, capital formation, and individual expression than did other societies, which often were theocracies, centralized palatial dynasties, or tribal unions."

He rightly points out that historically, "Western armies in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, as soldiers everywhere, were often annihilated -often lead by fools and placed in the wrong place in the wrong war at the wrong time. But their armies, for the cultural reasons this book has outlined, fought with a much greater margin of error than did their adversaries." He further contends Western armies "enjoyed innate advantages that over the long duration could offset the terrible effects of imbecilic generalship, flawed tactics, strained supply lines, difficult terrain, and inferior numbers -or a simple "bad day". These advantages were immediate and entirely cultural, and they were not the product of the genes, germs, or geography of a distant past."

Professor Hanson's thesis rings truer in light of recent events post 9/11, where we witnessed Afghanistan, the so-called "graveyard of Empires" collapse in a matter of weeks in the face of overwhelming technological might and brute firepower of the world's ultimate Western military force. Further, the current "clash of civilizations" only plays out the next chapter of Hanson's clear-sighted and remarkable book celebrating "the age old and arrogant Western idea that nothing is inexplicable to the god Reason."

Because serious military history is often a weak spot among practitioners of Medieval and Renaissance fencing and has been so overlooked in university circles, indeed, even dismissed as not "politically correct", Professor Hanson's highly original work is a timely and very welcome beacon of light. This book is highly recommended for anyone interested in Historical European martial arts. It particularly agreed with me as it presented ideas I had either long suspected or previously concluded on my own. It even reflects the germ of an idea I actually closed my '98 Medieval Swordsmanship book with, that our Western martial heritage is very much alive and well and all around us, but in different forms than chivalric armored knights and cavalier musketeers. Even of you end up questioning his conclusions, you will not easily dismiss the strength of his ideas.

[...]

One steps away from reading this book with a great appreciation for the benefits of our Western civilization, and, I hope, a fortified desire to protect it and its institutions from its enemies. Thankfully, this book's central argument also bolsters one's confidence about the strength and endurance of those institutions.
Although I agree with the central ideas presented by this book, probably because I very much wish them to be true, I am troubled by a couple of untidy loose ends that the author either fails to address or only touches upon.
For instance, what does "the West" mean? how does a state become "western" and how does it lose that status? It seemed that the author was too willing to apply the "Western" label to those situations where it supported his argument.
A corollary to that problem is - why doesn't he cover the annihilation of "western" ideas by invading armies? The "west" has not been universally successful in defending itself from foreign encroachment - if Poitiers was the "high-water mark" of Islamic conquest of Western Europe, what about the "tidal pools" and "inter-tidal zones" -- Spain, the Balkans, North Africa, Egypt and other Roman colonies?? Do those areas suddenly not count as the "west"? How did they lose that label - those colonies were the home of many great Roman thinkers, like Seneca, after all?
Perhaps the author's creative use of the label "western" is actually the result of some scale of "westernness"? Perhaps the Carolingian Monarchy was only "more western" than the Spanish Christians that were overrun by the Islamic invaders? But maybe they were "less western" than ancient greeks? What kept Alexander's troops "western" through their campaign throughout the known world? The author freely admits that at the end of his life, Alexander was more like the Persian kings who he destroyed than the Hellenic ideal his Greek tutors probably instilled in him - is each generation to be measured against the last for how "western" it is?
In any case, perhaps it is my faith in the strength of our institutions that makes me believe in (and unashamedly want to believe in) the central premise of this book; however, a reader would have to be willingly blinding themselves to overlook the perhaps too-convenient omissions. Nevertheless, I wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone interested in a rational and intriguing theory on why the West has triumphed militarily. As with any book with a broad theoretical argument, enjoy the tasty flesh of the fruit, but watch out for the rotten parts.

Victor Davis Hanson's illuminating work is sure to be provocative and controversial. The book's thesis is the West's unique and lethal form of warfare has propelled it to dominance in world affairs. This military tradition has common threads dating back to Ancient Greece and is reflective of a Western culture that emphasizes political and intellectual freedom. Hanson illustrates this unique Western way of warfare by studying 9 battles from the Greek-Persian encounter at Salamis in 480 BC to the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. Unlike recent books, such as Jared Diamond's "Guns Germs and Steel" (a book I greatly admire), that explain the world's unequal power distribution through geographical and topographical determinism, Hanson's book emphasizes military prowess determined by culture. Hanson, like Diamond, rightly disregards racist theories on Western power because they are totally without foundation. The work is fascinating because it does an outstanding job of exploring the sensitive subject of culture and its influence on military affairs. However, a few weaknesses detract from the overall message. First, China is hardly explored. Given its preeminence through much of ancient and medieval times, this is a serious omission. Secondly, Hanson's belief in "shock battle" as the superior form of warfare has undergone serious revision in the 20th century. Even with these weaknesses, the book is still an excellent read.
Throughout the work, Hanson constantly emphasizes several key attributes of Western warfare.
They are:
1) Desire for decisive battle or "shock battle" as he calls it. Unlike other military traditions that stress deception, raiding and skirmishing, Westerners prefer head-to-head collisions of massive armies on the battlefield.
2) Civic militarism or a "nation in arms". Western armies and navies are staffed with free citizens who are fighting for country NOT slaves and mercenaries.
3) Free inquiry and rationalism. Western militaries are self-critiquing and encourage individual initiative. Like all armies, Western armies have hierarchies, but they are flatter, more flexible and give their soldiers a rough sense of equality with their fellow comrades. Adherence to rationalism allows Western armies to place ultimate emphasis on military efficacy regardless of its impact on social and political structures. Constant innovation in tactics and technology is considered independent from political arrangements.
Hanson then goes on to explain that these attributes did not appear out of a vacuum but are reflective of Western culture. With its origins in Ancient Greece and Rome, this culture nurtured the concepts of citizenship and elaborate property rights. Although these states were hardly democracies by today's standards, they did create an environment where free individuals actively participated in decision-making and had rights and obligations within the state. Most soldiers in Ancient Greece and Rome were drafted from the small farmer class. These people owned their own plots and could not afford long and endless military campaigns. Armies in other ancient kingdoms were manned by slaves and mercenaries and therefore were not troubled by such campaigning. To minimize time away from the farm, Western armies sought short and decisive battles that would determine the outcome quickly and with finality. It also imbued Western soldiers with motivation seldomly found in Non-Western armies staffed with mercenaries and slaves - the desire to protect one's livelihood and freedom. Even when the Romans suffered a crushing defeat at Cannae, Rome was able to raise new armies of free soldiers by calling the nation to arms. Since these soldiers were free men who entered into a consensual contract with the Republic, they willingly succumbed to military discipline and temporarily shed their individualism to become part of a mass, uniform formation - the ultimate expression of egalitarianism. Western guarantees of property rights, limits on arbitrary government power and judicial review, allowed the productive energies of capitalism to flourish, therefore providing Western armies and navies with copious quantities of advanced weaponry. Hanson makes no claim on the moral superiority of Western warfare. In fact, he illustrates that this form of warfare is particularly bloody and gruesome.
The weaknesses of the book are twofold. First, he ignores China. Given China's significant contributions to warfare and technology throughout ancient and medieval times (i.e. gunpowder, compass, printing press, paper money, stirrup etc.), this is a major omission. Of course, this book is about the West, not China, therefore it might be beyond the scope of this work to examine China's military history in depth. Even if this is so, some form of a short comparative analysis with China's traditions could have lent more credence to his view of the uniquely lethal form of Western warfare. Secondly, one has to wonder about the future efficacy of "shock battle". Although this work is a retrospective look, a concluding chapter with a prospective view would have been interesting. The frontal assault's declining effectiveness was already evident early in the 20th century. Verdun, Somme and Paschendale (all WWI battles) were classic examples of direct encounters gone wrong. They all typified massive bloodletting with no decisive victory. Maybe in this age of advanced munitions, "shock battles" are just too costly to fight. After the catastrophic encounters of WWI, military planners had to devise more effective ways of combating the enemy without "running into the breach of a cannon". The most successful strategies of WWII and the last 50 years have emphasized maneuver and the "indirect" approach to warfare. The German Blitzkrieg, the American Pacific island-hopping campaign, Israeli victories in 1956, 1967 and 1973 and Desert Storm were all tremendously successful because they avoided enemy strong points and deceived the enemy as to the true direction of attack. The objective in all of these campaigns was decisive victory BUT through an indirect approach. Of course, all of these strategies were developed by Westerners, so Hanson should be proud.

Victor Davis Hanson's goal is truly ambitious : To find among the victories and defeats of Western armies against various foes the factors that gave the Western civilization such a military dominance over much of the world.
I'd say the demonstration is impressive, but not quite complete. He isolates some factors, among them civil militarism, democracy, capitalism, a tradition of scientific inquiry.
I see two weaknesses in the book :
First, the relationship between some of those factors is sometimes unclear. Is independent scientific inquiry a characteristic onto itself, or is it a consequence of a democratic tradition? The author does not seem to be quite sure (neither am I).
Second, the author takes some things for granted, for instance just mentioning that democracy and capitalism go hand in hand, without any attempt at proving that point. Unsupported, that conclusion could be shredded to pieces by even moderate authors like John Ralston Saul, who tried to demonstrate that "capitalism is happiest under dictatorships". Both democracy and capitalism are tricky concepts nowadays, more work would be needed to delve into that relationship in a satisfactory manner.
This being said, the book is wonderfully well-documented, entertaining for anyone with an interest in history (and not just military history), thought-provoking and very readable. It gave me the taste for more and sent me toward other history books. I may not agree with all of the author's conclusions, but reading the book certainly expanded my knowledge of the subject.

The thesis of this book is that Western civilization has interwoven into its cultural fabric some fundamental concepts of warfare that make the West invincible (in the long run) when in war against armies from other cultures, and extraordinary deadly when Western armies fight one another. The theory is that the seeds for this deadly culture of warfare can be found in the political organization of armies, starting with the assimilation of democratic ideals in the selection of generals and other leaders in Greece combined with the extreme discipline and organizational genius of the Romans; and above all in the near constant infusion of science and technology into the process of warfare that has led, over the centuries and up to the present, to a refinement of weapons and to the continual renewal of the techniques of war. The notion that the enemy should be obliterated by any means is central to Western warfare.
Not being a historian, I was surprised and delighted by the concepts and ideas that are presented in each of the nine critical battles that constitute the core of this book. It isn't that I don't know history at all, but I have never been lead by the hand and told of a battle "Here, look at this..." For instance, I was aware of Cortez and of his defeat of the Aztec empire with just a handful of men and horses, aware that the Mexica expected God-like creatures to come from the East as was prophesied, aware that the natives thought that men on horses were a single unit, etc. But that had little to do with why a few Spaniards won Tenochtitlan, the island city of the Aztecs. By the time they had lived among the natives for a few months, the notion that these were Gods had pretty well vanished: horses were seen as huge deer, and the Spaniards, who ate, defecated and mated just like the natives, had lost their divine glamor; and so when the natives drove them from their city on La Noche Triste (Melancholy Night), with a wounded Cortez, decimated troops, lost cannon and armaments, the Aztecs claimed victory but did not pursue them to extinction, which they could easily have done. It was not their habit to vanquish the enemy, but rather to capture and bind them and sacrifice them to their Gods. They did not follow through with their victory. Cortez, on the other hand, immediately started plotting a victorious return.
He found that the land that surrounded lake Texcoco was rich in minerals and chemicals needed for warfare; that enemies of the hated Aztecs would became willing partners in providing him help. Native metal smiths were given Spanish designs and crafted 100,000 copper arrowheads for their bows, and 50,000 metal bolts for the their crossbows; they obtained sulfur for gunpowder from the nearby Popocatepetl by lowering workers on ropes into the vocano's sides and scraping the chemical. Cortez ordered 13 prefabricated, shallow draft brigantines to be constructed in Veracruz. This fleet was dismantled for transportation across land, and reassembled at specially constructed canals on the shores of lake Texcoco. It took Cortez and his allies 13 months of frantic labor to do all that had to be done to conquer Tenochtitlan by land (over the causeways) and by water, and when he struck his blows not much was left of the Aztec capital. The slaughter was horrific, and afterwards there was no Aztec empire left. The traditions of the West, including great discipline, leadership, superior technology, adaptive tactics, and ruthlessness had prevailed once more.
The battles described in this book (brilliantly descibed!) are Salamis, Gaugamela, Cannae, Poitiers, Tenochtitlan, Lepanto, Rorke's Drift, Midway and Tet, covering a period from 480 BC to 1968. The prose and the narrative style are exciting and thus the book is hard to turn loose. I am sure historians will argue much about this work and its theoretical underpinnings; but as a non-historian I was delighted by the book, and so I recommend it to general readers with at least a smattering of history and a great deal of love for good prose.

Hanson's "Carnage and Culture" is worth reading for its vigorous style as well as its thought-provoking thesis. Books about military history are often fairly dry, but Hanson writes clearly and in the active voice, perhaps unconciously emulating the Western military tactics he describes.
He argues that Western success on the battlefield is a cultural phenomenon, not just the result of good fortune in the allocation of resources or the serendipity of technology. Free nations produce leaders and soldiers who take the initiative. Citizens who are protected by law against arbitrary action feel free to "audit" battles and criticize soldiers, leading to improved strategy and tactics. Western military commands are heirarchical, but not unduly so, so that they adapt well to changing circumstances. The result is an approach to battle that has been evolving since the time of the ancient Greeks, and that now involves applying maximum disclipline and violence at the point of engagement in order to annihilate, not merely defeat, an opponent.
Hanson discusses a series of battles to illustrate the differences between the "Western" style of war and the practices of cultures that he deems to be "non-Western": Salamis (480 BC); Gaugamela (331 BC); Cannae (216 BC); Poitiers (732); Tenochtitlan (1520-21); Lepanto (1571); Rourke's Drift (1879); Midway (1942) and Tet (1968). Each of these struggles illustrates a Western preference for decisive battle that inflicts enormous and disproportionate casualties on the loser.
Throughout, Hanson is very careful to stress that the losers are brave, smart individuals--he is not a racist and goes out of his way to explain that, person for person, the citizens of the West are no better than their non-Western counterparts. He does, however, argue that Western culture, for better or worse, produces better results on the battlefield than non-Western culture does. This position is sure to be viewed as politically incorrect, but it is certainly worth pondering.
"Carnage and Culture" is particularly interesting in these troubled times. I began reading the book shortly after the September 11 attacks, and I have found it to be highly predictive of the American conduct of the war in Afghanistan, as well as America's relentless success in that war. The collapse of the Taliban that seems remarkable to media pundits and those untutored in the Western way of war looks almost inevitable to those who have read Hanson's work. A wounded republic, like Rome after its horrendous defeat at Cannae, is a determined and ruthless enemy. As the historian Ross Leckie wryly observed in "Hannibal": "The Romans were a thorough lot. Carthage is a memory."
Having said all this, Hanson's book leaves almost untouched some fairly important questions. If freedom and initiative are so critical to Western military success, how do we explain the performance of totalitarian Germany's military in the early years of World War II and its quick defeat of the French democracy in 1940? Why were the Soviets, who endured purges and arbitrary executions in the 1930s and throughout World War II, ultimately successful against the more "Westernized" Germans? I suspect that Hanson could offer cogent answers to these questions, but it puzzles me that he did not volunteer them in his book.

Hanson's thesis and the battle histories with which he supports his thesis make "Carnage and Culture" essential reading, especially today with West and East facing off against each other once again. What it is in Western culture that makes its armies so lethal on the battlefield, is worth serious study by both East and West. Once again we have a numerically superior people who believe in the glory of individual acts of suicidal bravery confronting a West that believes in massive retaliation by disciplined, well-equipped, close-order ranks of defenders fighting a coordinated and relentless mission of anhiliation. It's a story that, according to Hanson, has been told over and over again. And it's a story that certainly suggests what the tactics and the outcome are probably going to look like as the US and a few real allies prepare to do battle with a badly mobilized fifth-column of terrorist paladins. Very timely book.

Why was the roman citizenry still eager to fight after dozens of years of defeat, while Carthage was destroyed after one battle? Is it feasible to simply assume that Cortez's men, who had not numbered more than a thousand came to dominate a foe, whose forces numbered in the hundreds of thousands, simply because of superior arms and armor? Why is it that an islamic caliphate, with vastly superior resources and manpower only been able to defeat weak and unpopular empires, and their armies defeated upon coming to more organized, but in almost all other respects, weaker franks? Why was it that the more advanced, and much stronger Japanese unable to win support among thier neighbors, or defeat a usually weak fleet in the pacific?
This book makes it clear that explainations such as mere logistics, advanced technology, or, the most dubious of all, general superiority are simply not true, as the west would often prvail through just as much or worse (such as a crusade was over a much longer and dangerous road from france to Jeruselumn, than from spain to Paris). Along with this, it is also an enjoyable read and hard to put down

I enjoyed this book. The depiction of each set piece battle is masterfully researched and written, and I agree with the author's central argument, that Western cultural adaptability and political freedom culminate in war machines capable of projecting Western military power globally. The "West" is an elastic concept, however, and I would have liked him to pin it down more specifically. For example, the German tribes who resisted assimilation by the might of Rome and ultimately carved up her empire between them - were they "Western?" More "Western" than Rome? Had exposure to Roman cultural influence
"Westernized" them? Or was the degeneration of the imperial court into "Oriental despotism" the source of its downfall?
In his afterward, Hanson complains about being deluged with a flood of "minutiae, with references to obscure battles and weapons that would substantiate, modify or reject my thesis - as if nine representative battles from some 2,500 years of military history could in any way be exhaustive in matters of detail." (p 462). Well, you were the one making the sweeping assumptions, Vic. Anyway, here is some minutiae of mine to add to the pile.
"Past, present, and future, the story of military dynamism in the world is ultimately an investigation into the prowess of Western arms," Hanson assures us. How about Western luck?
In 1241 an army whose discipline, mobility, and amorality had never before been seen (or emulated) in the West was at the gates of Europe. The Mongols, having already subdued the Asian steppe, overrun Russia, defeated the Poles and their German allies at Leignitz and Hungary at the Sajo River, were only stopped by the death of their khan in December of that year.
Hanson does not refer to this - in fact, the word "Mongol" doesn't appear in his book. The most he will allow is to refer to "Tribal musters fueled by promises of booty," leading to "enormous and spirited armies... the nomadic invasions of Genghis Khan (1206-27) and Tamerlane (1381-1405), who overran much of Asia, are the most notable examples... But even the most murderous hordes could not really sustain - feed, clothe, and pay - a military force with sophisticated weaponry for a lengthy period of time." (p 275). This is an unfair characterization of the Mongols, who produced what remains, pound for pound, the most perfect war machine in history, and were the terror of the Old World for generations.
Hanson says, "Adrianople (378) and Manzikert (1071) were horrendous Western defeats; but the Romans and Byzantines who were slaughtered there were for the most part vastly outnumbered, far from home, poorly led, and reluctant emissaries of crumbling empires." (p 12-13). "Poorly led," yes, but the Romans were not outnumbered at Adrianople and vastly outnumbered the Turks at Manzikert; far from being "far from home," Adrianople was less than a hundred miles from the imperial capital at Constantinople, and Manzikert, while remote, was still within imperial territory; and far from being "reluctant emissaries of crumbling empires," the Roman and Byzantine armies were comprised of professional soldiers led in person by their emperors and defending a state that had centuries of life left to it.
In Chapter 5 - "Landed Infantry" - Hanson argues in rather romantic terms that the free, property-owning warriors of the Merovingian Empire saved Western civilization from the first great Islamic Jihad at Poitiers in 732. In fact, Europe had already passed its greatest test in a confrontation he only touches on - the Byzantine repulse of the Arab siege of Constantinople from 673-78, and their second successful defense against an even larger Arab Armada in 717-18 (which he curiously neglects to mention).
Hanson admits, even in the event of defeat at Poitiers, "Permanent Islamic possession of the entirety of France... was unlikely." (p 143). If Byzantium had fallen, the Caliphs would have transferred their flag to Constantinople, and everything from the Bosphorus to the Baltic would have been Islamized within a generation. Christianity would have been isolated and hemmed in against the Atlantic. It may have collapsed altogether.
This didn't happen because the Byzantines prevailed. Why? Because they were "Western?" Modern historians don't consider them so, and neither did contemporary Westerners. Arab penetration of Europe was halted not by free property owning citizen farmers defending a nascent democratic republic, but by a civilization no less theocratic, and much more rigidly autocratic, than its "alien" rival.
The thesis of Chapter 9 - "Individualism" - which uses the example of the Japanese defeat at Midway do demonstrate superior Western initiative being harnessed as a component of a superior war machine, is also problematic. How much of "the West" are we talking about here?
Japan was more than a match for any other Western power it challenged in the Pacific. First Russia (a "Western" power?) was humiliated at the turn of last century, then, in the space of little more than two months, Japan stripped The Netherlands of her entire empire in the East Indies, a region she had dominated for centuries, and inflicted some of the worst defeats in British history.
On every front in 1941 Japanese tactics, initiative and equipment were superior to that of the Western powers they faced. The United States was capable of making a comeback. The others were not. Britain was no match for Japan. Even if she had been free to send her entire fleet to the Pacific to confront the Rising Sun, I strongly suspect the result would have been another Tsushima.
Was the United States successful because it was more "Western" than the rest of the West? If so, how?
The same question applies to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union - both vastly more powerful than any Western power other than the United States, and capable of tremendous scientific achievements that gave them a cutting edge in warfare. How do they fit into Hanson's "Western" paradigm?

This author is sure controversial, but he is always worth reading - perhaps the most intelligent of the neoconservative authors writing today. On this kind of issue, his chosen field of ancient history, he is in fact right - which is why I give him five stars. The Greeks may not have been a democracy in the sense that we understand that word, inherited from them of course, today, but they were fighting for what they believed in, unlike the might imperial armies of Persia, their main enemy. So well worth reading. Christopher Catherwood, author of CHRISTIANS, MUSLIMS AND ISLAMIC RAGE (Zondervan, 2003 - a book that quotes Hanson more than once)

I thought I knew a little thing about history, until I got into this book. I had never even heard of Lepanto.

If you want to see what western civ is all about, look at how it fights its wars and you'll see what aspects of its culture are firmly rooted in survival since Salamis. I actually learned more about how other cultures fight than I did about the west:

- why the Persians never reconsidered their battle plans as the day unfolded at Salamis (the same reasons they lost so many at Thermopylae, most likely!)
- why Cannae didn't destroy the Roman republic,
- why the muslim army at Poitiers didn't learn from it's loss and fight better the next time,
- why the Aztecs never figured out a way to defeat Cortes, even when they had him cornered. This was way before smallpox did them all in a few years later.

Comparing non western militaries to western ones reads like a pee wee football team taking on the NFL. I have a much greater appreciation for my Dad's constant reminders to 'think critically' when making important decisions as I was growing up!

I purchased book as required for an undergraduate military history course two years ago. This is the only book I have left from my undergrad courses. Fast read. Reads like a novel. This was a pleasant surprise. I expected dry, 'over my head' reading, but instead found myself engrossed in the book.
Reccommend this to military history students or those interested in military history in general.

"Carnage and Culture" by Victor Davis Hanson is an answer-book to Jared Diamond's "Guns, germs and steel" : if the UCLA's biologist explicated the western supremacy of the world with environmental and naturalistic causes, the historian from Fresno explicated with military reasons ; the West won cause he introduced a new way to warfare(this idea is not original at all, but was introduced by John Keegan).
This is a two-faces book : Hanson is good, often wonderful, when he describe battles and their horrors, is disputable when he express his ideology, sometimes ridiculous : English soldier of the XIX century was better than Zulu warrior only for gun, not for liberalism. Hanson was far more convincing in his precedent book "The Western Way of War", dedicated only to ancient Greece.
How many stars ? It depends from your political view : one if you're radical, two if you're liberal, three if you're moderate, four if you're conservative...

Hanson really seems to have a knack for analyzing how society's input has shaped Western warfare. I must admit, I was biased towards the chapters on Rorke's Drift and Midway, however the entire book is fascinating. I found it easy to side with Hanson on most points, though I tended to lean his way before reading the book.

The only drawback to the book was the ending chapter (the Tet Offensive). I would have loved to have seen an analysis of the first Persian Gulf War or Any of the US military excursions to Africa in the late 90's.

The discriptions of battles and how the cultures of the various combatants influenced the way they fought are very interesting. However the final analysis of each battle seems to be :

the western side won because of or lost in spite of :

- Freedom of the individual troops - meaning they were better able to act independently and fought harder as they were not coerced

- disciplined "scientific" approach to war

- willingless, even strong desire to win a war in a risk all decisive battle

- use of a strong heavy infantry that is used as a shock force

Some of these points seem to be valid but it seems to me that at time Hanson is reaching to define a given army as "western" or even to show that the western way of thought and approach to war can be traced in an unbroken chain all the way back to the greeks at Salamis. I suppose in a book like this he needs to choose only certain confrontations however the jump from Hannibal at Cannae to the Franks repelling islamic invaders seems overly large - skipping everything from the later roman republic to the invasion of Constantinople by the Turks.

Still not wanting to be overly negative - this is an interesting book and a good counter argument to the Jared Diamond theory that western hegemony is mainly based on an accident of geography.

Mr. Hanson has created a very interesting work in this piece, and it is worthwhile to contrast this work with "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and also with Caleb Carr's "The Lessons of Terror, a history of warfare against civilians" to see how different people can analyze so many of the same events and come to completely different perspectives.

Classics Professor Victor Davis Hanson arguement in this book is the characteristics of Western Civilization, namely individual rights, capitalism, rationalism, dissent, and military discipline have lead to it's survival and dominance of the world. It is an unpopular one academically, since it asserts the "oppressors" of the world as having a reason for why they're on top. Hanson dismisses Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" in a matter of a paragraph, and makes his case most eloquently.

The basic idea, applied to our current situation in the world, tells me the War on Terrorism is ours to lose.

This is a great book but the argument is misleading.

A thriving economy, technological innovations and the concurrent mindsets are responsible for military dominance. These points are fairly obvious but Hanson does a great job fleshing out the method of their operation in the establishment of empires.

But Hanson argues that the Greek notion freedom is the ultimate root of this supremacy. The notion of freedom is hard to define, hard to test and doesn't explain much of history.

It would be better to measure a society's judicial system's power to override the caste system as the foundational factor in a society's success. The stronger the judicial system or the weaker the caste system, the more successful the society. This makes sense from an economic perspective and Hanson shows how this mindset contributes towards military success. From this starting point, one can then explore the mindsets found in societies with successful judicial systems versus the societies with very strong caste systems to fill out the story line.

The more religious the society, the less able justice can override caste, leading to the eventual downfall of once great societies: with Rome destroyed by Christianity and China destroyed by Buddhism being the two best examples.

In much of South America, Central America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, where religious thinking prevented the operation of an effective judicial system in the first place, these areas are doomed to perpetual corruption and external exploitation.

One application of the judicial efficacy theory would be at the end of the Peloponnesian War where the Athenian assembly while retaining their long held ideals of freedom and democraZy became very mob rule, arbitrary, vindictive, and religious minded in their application of justice towards their naval commanders to the point that the Athenian command became demoralized and Sparta literally was able to row in and take out the entire Athenian fleet with nary a raised voice which would forever end Athenian greatness... too bad... should have given those commanders a fair trial! Fortunately, later cultures addressed this mistake and created a military-specific judicial system.

In any case, just take Hanson's Greek political theory of freedom and substitute the concept of justice and the book is an excellent ride through western world history. Too bad Hanson completely ignores Chinese history, it's extremely insulting and distracting but that is typical of military historians.

Ultimately, China was to blame for that... thanks to Buddhist influences... the Chinese couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag and deserved the all the exploitation they got, sadly.

Still, Carnage and Culture's positive aspects outweigh the negatives and is worth reading.

The basic premise of his story is that Western civilization has prevailed in numerous battles over the past 2500 years. Hanson emphasizes that the cornerstones of this success are based on the inherent Western values of individualism and liberty.

I'm a big fan of Hanson's commentaries on current methods of warfare, and it was that basis that drove me to purchase and read this book. I'm not certain what motivated Hanson to write this tome, other than the fact that he's a military historian and this subject would appear to be the core of his research.

Hanson uses examples from history to provide a fact-base for Western success. These example battles range from the Battle of Salamis (Greeks and Persians), to the more recent Battle of Midway (United States and Japan) and the Tet Offensive (United States and Viet Nam).

After reading this book, I'm still not certain of the ideal audience. For example, the warfare enthusiasts can find plenty of alternatives that get into much greater detail about the tactics and weapons used. Meanwhile, the political science reader would probably find the deep discussions about battles a little mind-numbing.

[...]

There are great historians (Jacques Barzun, Martin Gilbert), near great historians (Stephen Ambrose), and then there are the good. Victor Hanson (VH) belongs to this latter category. Think of "Culture and Carnage" as a series of essays about significant battles, rather than chapters with building blocks of an argument, as VH is ultimately unconvincing in his thesis. He is not convincing because he makes the common mistake of confusing correlation with cause. Yes, the West did win all the battles in his book (that's the correlation), but VH is unable to prove why (that's the cause). Ironically, VH's bete noire, Jared Diamond, understands this principle much better.
In the first chapter VH presents a rambling definition of the western social and cultural values that made western arms superior. He describes the Greeks as having consensual government, equality among the middle class, civilian audit of military affairs, and politics apart from religion, freedom and individualism and rationalism (p. 4, Anchor edition). However, at the battle of Salamis, VH in no way shows how these ideals contributed to victory. That the Greeks were defending their homeland was certainly a motivating factor. Moreover, an important part of the Persian navy, the "experienced Egyptian contingent" (p. 44), did not take part in the battle, therefore the Greeks were more evenly matched. Perhaps the western value that resulted in victory was Fortuna.
Moving forward, how then were these values demonstrated in Alexander's Greece, who by VH's own words Alexander was an unelected king, from a land of masters and surfs? VH asserts that Alexander's father, Phillip, adopted the Hellenic tradition of individual initiative (p, 80). Really? How is this manifest? Phillip also "embraced the rationalist tradition and the disinterested pursuit of science and natural inquiry apart from religion and government" (p. 80). Sounds pretty forced to me, and it's not clear at all how one could extrapolate such nuances thousands of years later. On the following page, not letting his own facts get in the way, VH tells us that Alexander rejected constitutional government and civic militarism. We're only to the second battle of the book, and if VH hasn't already refuted his own assertion (western values equal military might), then he's at least guilty of changing the definition of what western values are. Yet he keeps trying: page 93 VH tells us "only freemen who voted and enjoyed liberty were willing to endure such terrific infantry collisions"; VH just told us Alexander's soldiers didn't vote - which is it?
It rarely gets better. We're asked to believe that the armies that fought at Cannae (Roman) and Potiers (feudal Europe) represented societies that had equality in the middle class, a consensual government, or politics apart from religion. The same can be said for the Spanish from Inquisition, Catholic Spain at the battle of Tenochtitlan. And so on.
Unlike other reviewers, I enjoyed, but did not necessarily agree with, VH's writings about the Vietnam war. Of particular interest are the observations on the impact of television and mass communications on the public's perception of the war. (William Manchester foreshadows this in his WWII memoir, "Goodbye Darkness". Manchester recounts the Pentagon's decision to release photos of dead Marines on Tarawa, and the ensuring public outcry.)
VH's attempted reply to Jared Diamond's (JD) "Guns, Germs, and Steel" is rather puny. Consider the case where VH, while describing the battle of Midway, states that "Japan is thus the classic refutation of the now popular idea that topography, resources such as iron and coal deposits, or genetic susceptibility to disease and other natural factors largely determine cultural dynamism and military prowess." Let's leave "genetic susceptibility" and "cultural dynamism" on the table, ok? For JD, the race has ended by 1500 A.D, when European culture begins to expand and dominate worldwide. By comparison, Japan's rise and fall, coming much later, is just a flash in the pan, hardly a credible counterpoint. Japan, for the most part never had any colonies, was in fact hindered because of a lack of natural resources, and, as VH well describes, adopts the steel of the west. Of course, VH is also offended by JD's statements about European intelligence; he need not be. JD's assertions in this area are wholly subjective and can in no way be substantiated.
At times the writing is peculiar. Consider the vocabulary when discussing death in battle; it is the vocabulary of morbid fascination, and the uninitiated. Samples include "murderous dividends" (p. 4), young men "rotting", "harpooned", or "washing up in chunks", machine gun bullets to the brow, carving and ripping arteries and organs in the belly (p. 7), and "robust physiques turned into goo" (p. 8). There's no shortage of colorful language. In the chapter on Roake's Drift, VH detours to discuss a hypothetical case of a motorcycle gang armed with Uzis taking on a regiment of VMI students, unblemished by misdemeanors or shots fired in anger. How now? What kind of Tom Clancy garbage is that? Further along, in the chapter on Midway, VH confirms Tom Brokaw's theory of generational greatness, when he frets that an "America of suburban, video playing Nicoles, Ashleys, and Jasons" (p.351) would likely never equal the greatest generation. This is a variation on the theory that the hardship of the Depression prepared the United States for the rigors of WWII. I would concede this is partially true, but no generation has a monopoly on duty, honor, or love of country. And don't tell VH that video games are in fact used in a soldier's training.
Read "Culture and Carnage", but do not expect too much. There's lots of interesting information about the battles, but there's really not much else.

Hanson does an excellent job of explaining why the West has always managed to be victorious over Eastern cultures. His primary thesis is that our democracy, free-markets and Western rationalism have been the main-spring of our ability to defeat other civilizations throughout history.
Hanson states that the political and economic institutions of the West produce better weaponry and give our soldiers a stake in the outcome of a particular armed conflict. Other political and economic institutions, such as the theocracies in the case of the Islamic fundamentalist regimes of the Middle East, fail in comparison to the West because they do not permit the freedom required to give rise to open scientific inquiry and the dynamic economy required to produce cutting edge weaponry.

Before I read this book, I always assumed the dominance of the West was due to some luck; quick to use firearms, a few good generals etc. This book shows how important free markets, free minds, and liberty are in waging war and maintaining power. Magnificent book.

Hanson certainly dosn't accept Diamond's thesis in the book Guns, Germs, and Steel, stating in Carnage and Culture that Diamond embraces a view that does not properly consider cultural impacts of history but instead focuses too much on biological and geocraphical aspects... This is clearly the view of a historian. And Diamond's view is clearly the view of a biologist. But, the fact is that their theories are not conflicting, but actually cohesive. There combined thesis forms a more general and clearer picture, one that is formed collectively from different perspectives and can be further improved by reading Economist Dave Sowell's book Race And Culture, which explains the West's superiority based on economic factors throughout history.

Overall, Carnage and Culture is a great book. I originally got it for Christmas because I enjoy books about military history, but ended up with something much more far-reaching and thought-provoking. A garunteed good read for anyone that has a brain and wants to use it.

Victor Davis Hanson carries an attractive thesis about war forward from more than two thousand years ago then loses me entirely at what he is really talking about, the war of my childhood. He talks about some polity called North Viet Nam, their troops and those of the Viet Cong. No such polity or armies have existed. In the war for Viet Nam, Ha Noi fielded the People's Army of Viet Nam. Saigon fielded the defense forces of the Republic of Viet Nam. People of the southern delta and the central and western mountains fought in different militias with alliances to Ha Noi, Saigon, or to other organizations altogether. The two states in this civil war attracted support from the United States of America, the People's Republic of China, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and some not all of the allies of these three rivals. That is about as simply as it can be put. No one who speaks of North Viet Nam or South Viet Nam or the Viet Cong in the US newspaper sense of village revolutionaries knows what he or she is talking about because he or she cannot know these things because they have not existed. They are ghosts. You can bet that anyone who talks about the North Vietnamese Army will also as Victor does pay no attention to the allies of the United States, the citizens of the Republic of Viet Nam. Hey, aside from that, terrific book:

Victor Davis Hanson is simply my favorite military history writer of today. In Carnage and Culture he takes battles that have been the object of extensive research and writing, and develops interesting and profound new insights and angles. His inate ability to interrelate battles spanning over a thousand years, provides a holistic view of military warfare from a Western perspective. This is a superb book!

Normally, I enjoy VDH considerably, and for the most part, I think his theses are correct, and I think this book is no exception--it has considerable merrit.

I find that Hanson has one strange quirk--an irrational hatred of Alexander the Great. Why hate Alexander and not Caesar or Hannibal or even Cortes to the same inexplicable degree? This is one I could never figure out, but I think Hanson may have given me my answer in this book. As Hanson says: "He [Alexander] also had antipathy, not allegiance, to agrarianism" (161) And there it is in a nutshell. Hanson, the self-described farmer, constantly gushing over agrarianism, hates Alexander because of his dislike (supposedly) of agrarianism. I rather wish he would get over it.

The reason for the 2 stars is due mostly because Hanson takes this hatred of Alexander to a rather illogical extreme. Usually in his books I can overlook his bizarre generalizations and righteous lecturing about killing (strange for a military historian, yes?) but not in this one. As Hanson states on page 89: "Scholars sometimes compare Alexander to Caesar, Hannibal, or Napoleon, who likewise by sheer will and innate military genius sought empire far beyond what their own native resources might otherwise allow. There are affinities with each; but an even better match would be Adolf Hitler--" That's right folks, Hitler = Alexander. And how does he justify this? Let's take a look. First he calls them "singular military geniuses of the west"--a statement that any scholar of Hitler will find ridiculous. Hitler was anything but a military genius, and hardly singular at that. He also says they were both intent on loot and plunder...and that is different from nearly every military commander how? And to contend that Hitler was intent on loot and plunder I find to be simplistic and probably an untrue generalization. He also states that both were kind to animals--I love my cat, does that make me Hitler? Probably one of the few actual similarities was "they both talked of their own destiny and divinity"...although making a comparision on this alone is just bad history--are they the only two to do such? I think not. He sprinkles in a few other safe genralities that I can hardly make sense of, the only one with any merrit being that they both deposed of many of their subbordinates.

So why, exactly, does he make such a comparision that is at best bent over backwards? As I said before, it is all about is irrational hatred of Alexander, and his desire to impart it onto you, the reader. How better a way to do it than to make the comparison to Hitler? The chapter on Gaugamela alone brought this down to 2 stars--the extra star is because I actually think the thesis is about right. (Oh, and his hatred of Alexander may well come about because Alexander presents something of an aberation to the general thesis of Hanson's, present in mostly all of his books.)

The thesis of this book is that Western civilization has interwoven into its cultural fabric some fundamental concepts of warfare that make the West invincible (in the long run) when in war against armies from other cultures, and extraordinary deadly when Western armies fight one another. The theory is that the seeds for this deadly culture of warfare can be found in the political organization of armies, starting with the assimilation of democratic ideals in the selection of generals and other leaders in Greece combined with the extreme discipline and organizational genius of the Romans; and above all in the near constant infusion of science and technology into the process of warfare that has led, over the centuries and up to the present, to a refinement of weapons and to the continual renewal of the techniques of war. The notion that the enemy should be obliterated by any means is central to Western warfare.
Not being a historian, I was surprised and delighted by the concepts and ideas that are presented in each of the nine critical battles that constitute the core of this book. It isn't that I don't know history at all, but I have never been lead by the hand and told of a battle "Here, look at this..." For instance, I was aware of Cortez and of his defeat of the Aztec empire with just a handful of men and horses, aware that the Mexica expected God-like creatures to come from the East as was prophesied, aware that the natives thought that men on horses were a single unit, etc. But that had little to do with why a few Spaniards won Tenochtitlan, the island city of the Aztecs. By the time they had lived among the natives for a few months, the notion that these were Gods had pretty well vanished: horses were seen as huge deer, and the Spaniards, who ate, defecated and mated just like the natives, had lost their divine glamor; and so when the natives drove them from their city on La Noche Triste (Melancholy Night), with a wounded Cortez, decimated troops, lost cannon and armaments, the Aztecs claimed victory but did not pursue them to extinction, which they could easily have done. It was not their habit to vanquish the enemy, but rather to capture and bind them and sacrifice them to their Gods. They did not follow through with their victory. Cortez, on the other hand, immediately started plotting a victorious return.
He found that the land that surrounded lake Texcoco was rich in minerals and chemicals needed for warfare; that enemies of the hated Aztecs would became willing partners in providing him help. Native metal smiths were given Spanish designs and crafted 100,000 copper arrowheads for their bows, and 50,000 metal bolts for the their crossbows; they obtained sulfur for gunpowder from the nearby Popocatepetl by lowering workers on ropes into the vocano's sides and scraping the chemical. Cortez ordered 13 prefabricated, shallow draft brigantines to be constructed in Veracruz. This fleet was dismantled for transportation across land, and reassembled at specially constructed canals on the shores of lake Texcoco. It took Cortez and his allies 13 months of frantic labor to do all that had to be done to conquer Tenochtitlan by land (over the causeways) and by water, and when he struck his blows not much was left of the Aztec capital. The slaughter was horrific, and afterwards there was no Aztec empire left. The traditions of the West, including great discipline, leadership, superior technology, adaptive tactics, and ruthlessness had prevailed once more.
The battles described in this book (brilliantly descibed!) are Salamis, Gaugamela, Cannae, Poitiers, Tenochtitlan, Lepanto, Rorke's Drift, Midway and Tet, covering a period from 480 BC to 1968. The prose and the narrative style are exciting and thus the book is hard to turn loose. I am sure historians will argue much about this work and its theoretical underpinnings; but as a non-historian I was delighted by the book, and so I recommend it to general readers with at least a smattering of history and a great deal of love for good prose.

Hanson's writing takes you an a journey; both informative and evocative. His arguments are well established; deserves to be listed among such seminal books as Hungtington's Clash of Civilizations. It's a must read for anyone interested in geopolitics or military events. Hanson also takes on and in my opinion, successfully debunks other theories and scholars, such as pulitzer prize winner Jared Diamond. An interdisciplinary delight that you won't want to put down.

Definitely worth reading if you like military history ! Very well written and easy to follow ... just found it slightly repetitive in terms of the ideas which he wanted to put across. If you're a warfare fan don't miss out on this book !

Hanson's well-written book proves that there is a regimented mechanistic brutality at the very heart of western capitalist-democracy. He claims it as a virtue. I wouldn't.
He spoils the book in my opinion with his final chapter on Vietnam. It seems to have little relevance to the arguments presented elsewherr in the book. It is used as a convenient hanger for Mr Hanson to slam those whom he claim "lost" the Vietnam War for America.

The common wisdom is that the reason the West has won so many wars is greater technology and greater economic strength. Hanson seems to think that this is not the case, and that better discipline, shock battle, individualism, a tradition of dissent, and a whole host of other factors play equally consistent roles. He tries to prove that this is the case. I don't believe he succeeds in that effort. Instead, the whole book winds up reading like a Europe-is-better diatribe without the proof necessary to make such statements.

Without going into too much detail, let me make a few points.

1. A major probelm throughout the book is that Hanson seems to claim as "Western" anything that is good. He talks about "Western" science and mathematics, for example, while ignoring the fact that many theories and technologies came from the same Arab countries that the "West" supposedly dominates. Words like "algebra" and "algorithm," for example, come from Arabic.

And what's the deal with the inventions? When Europeans learn gunpowder from the Chinese, Hanson portrays them as simply using their Western ways of learning and adapting to create Western style weapons. But when the Japanese learn how to build planes to improve their weaponry, Hanson describes them as having "westernized" their military. This is clearly biased reporting.

2. Freedom: Does giving soldiers freedom make them better fighters? Even in the West, there have been numerous dictators who've deprived their soldiers and citizens of freedom, including Hitler and Alexander. Genghis, Mao, and Ho deprived their people of freedom, and none of them ever lost a war while they were living.

Hanson explains this away by saying that the Westerner's so-called "tradition" of Western values makes up for their temporary loss of democratic values. Yet the non-Democratic Genghis and Mao did just as well. What kind of logic is this?

3. Better discipline and tactics: Hanson erroneously thinks that West has a monopoly on war tactics. I brought this up with a friend of mine who used to serve in the Navy. He laughed and said that educated military officers in the U.S. and in Europe all read Sun Tsu's "Art of War" as a means of learning war strategy.

I guess Hanson will now claim that Sun Tsu stole "Western" ideas...

4. Midway: Well, considering that the Japanese beat the Russians, who were considerably more Europeanized, doesn't that say something about their method of war?

Also, Hanson claims that technology isn't everything. They why is this the only battle he brings up where the Other had the technological advantage?

5. Vietnam: I have no idea how bringing up Tet proves anything. America lost that war. The point of this chapter was to show that a tradition of dissent improves Western war, but in this case, it lost the war. Hanson seems to think that the Americans could have won the war if they had held on to key positions won during Tet--he mentions casuality rates to "prove" it. Well, coulda, shoulda, woulda. Theories prove nothing; it's the end result that people look at. Wasn't that the opinion of the rest of the book?

Hanson also accuses Martin Luther King, David Halberstam, and a whole slew of other well respected journalists and leaders of lying about the war. He doesn't go into details. Just accusations and slander.

6. Afghanistan: Afghanistan really proved to me exactly how full of it Hanson is. He says that America faced a "logistical nightmare of fighting in a landlocked country 6,000 miles away" and that the terorists enjoyed "both internal and foreign support."

This is a complete lie.

I was in New York during 9/11. I watched and read everything about the War in Afghanistan. There was never any doubt that we would win. We removed the Taliban, and killed many of their top leaders. Victory was never in doubt, especially since we had better equipment, a better economy, and the ENTIRE world standing behind us. We knocked them out with our superior planes and bombs. Everyone expected it, and it happened.

Mr. Hanson's revisionist recollection of events is atrocious.

In the end, I think it's safe to say that this book failed to prove its thesis. Technology and capital are the driving forces behind Western victories.

I'm giving this book two stars rather than one star because I felt that it was an interesting read. It challenged me to learn more about Salamis, Lepanto, and all of the earlier wars which my grade school teachers never taught me. I'm giving this an extra star because it presented some parts of history with which I am unfamiliar, and it urged me to learn more.

That being said, Hanson should spend more time trying to tell the truth.

Victor Davis Hanson has written one of those books, which gives military history a bad name among historians. While serious, thoughtful, intelligent, provocative, even tragic monographs are ignored among the public, it appears that any mediocrity can slap a few ruminations about Gettysburg or D-Day and make a bestseller. To be fair Mr. Hanson is a well reputed professor of Classics and he has written extensively on military affairs. But this popular book shows many of the weaknesses of military history. It suffers, for a start, from a monomaniacal thesis, what Matt Groening once called "The Nation that Controls Magnesium controls the Universe" syndrome. Looking at eight battles from the Greek victory over the Persians at Salamis, to the defeat of Tet Offensive, Hanson announces a bold reason for the supremacy of the Western world. The West, and only the West, has developed a uniquely powerful military combination that has triumphed over all others. Whereas others suggest the West's supremacy over the rest of the planet rose in the last two or three centuries, Hanson looks back to the fifth century BC. Although it is not entirely clear in Hanson's account whether this supremacy is the cause or effect of western triumph, there is clearly some articulation between its essentially liberal and capitalist values and its triumphant militarism. In the west, the combination of "Civic Militarism" with a uniquely thorough, ruthless and vicious style of warfare has led to victory after victory.
Well, while obviously the West would not have triumphed if it did not have military superiority, Hanson's superficiality soon becomes clear. "Civic militarism" has some kind of strange continuity that moves from Athenian municipal democracy to Roman oligarchy to Dark Ages Chaos to Feudal Europe down to the present day. If "civic militarism" is so powerful, why was Machiavelli so unsuccessful in promoting it in Florence (and why was Florence so unsuccessful in promoting it in Italy, or Italy in 16th century Europe)? Capitalism is dated back anachronistically to the early Greeks. Dealing with the great Muslim conquests that would seem to have deprived Europe of clear military superiority for about a millennium, Hanson comments that the Arabs were most successful in those parts of the Roman empire that weren't "really" western. This would apparently include Greece, under Ottoman rule for about half of the last millennium. The comparison with China, the key area of discussion in Why Did the West Triumph? debate, is brief and superficial, and the fact that much of the West's military technology, from stirrup to gunpowder, came form China is continually elided. (No mention of Kenneth Pomeranz or Joseph Needham here) When the non-West triumphs over the West it is simply because they copied Western technology and practice. From this book you'd think Europe invented base ten arithmetic and algebra. And it is hard to see "Civic militarism" playing much of a role in the single most important battle of this century, Kursk. There is also a tendency for Hanson to vigorously denounce alternative arguments, only to incorporate them later in his account (particularly in discussing the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, and the role of native help and disease). So Hanson's account comes down to the argument that civic militarism always won, except when it didn't.
I can�t say I particularly care for the sneering reference to Jared Diamond. But the most irritating chapter is the final one on Tet. Basically, Hanson�s view is that of the Republican Right, the defeated generals and the �revisionists� that the United States won the military battle on Tet, but lost the war thanks to a deceitful media, whining and traitorous intellectuals, and a muddled political and military strategy that failed to smash the North Vietnamese. That this view is widely popular does not alter the fact that it is wrong. First, off the battle of Tet did not take a few weeks, it took a year and a half before the NLF was decisively defeated. And a couple of years later they were on the road to revival. Second, the American problem in the Vietnam war was not so much an inability to defeat the NLF or the North whenever they met in open combat; it was the political failure of the Southern government that required consistent American aid all the time, and the consequent inability of the South to defend itself despite having large military superiority until the very final weeks. Hanson adds nothing new to this and his own comments are glib and shallow. He suggests the United States should have invaded the North in 1965 and glibly dismisses the prospect of Chinese intervention. Yet as Edwin Moise and other scholars have pointed out, Chinese intervention was a real possibility, not an idle threat. And one does not find in National Review in 1965 consistent support for massive escalation. Hanson rather airily suggests that perhaps the United States should not have been involved at all, though he spends much of the chapter denouncing those who pointed that out. He sneers at those who complain about the hundred or so who were murdered at My Lai, when in fact close to 500 were murdered there (and the perpetrators got off almost scot free). He all but calls Peter Arnett a liar on little more than the word of the fearlessly dishonest American military public relations regime. He conscripts �Fortunate Son� and �Born in the USA� as pro-war songs, and in his scapegoating of the media he ignores William Hammond�s and Daniel Hallin�s books which shows how long the media gave the government the benefit of the doubt. I think this chapter is crucial. It shows that even Hanson�s hindsight isn�t 20